With wide application of portable wireless terminals, various location based services (LBS), for example, applications for navigation, local search, location-based advertisement placement, and location-based friend making, need to be implemented by using a positioning function of a wireless terminal. Currently, positioning technologies that are widely used include: global positioning system (GPS) positioning, an assisted GPS (A-GPS), cellular positioning, Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) positioning, Bluetooth positioning, and the like.
To resolve a technical problem that universally exists in the positioning technologies, for example, a problem that additional costs and power consumption are relatively high because infrastructure or a peripheral device needs to be relied upon in a positioning process, currently, a positioning manner in which information of another node on a wireless network is used, that is, collaborative positioning, is provided. The existing collaborative positioning generally includes: collaborative positioning that is based on information complementation and collaborative positioning that is based on distance measurement. For example, a specific work manner of the collaborative positioning that is based on information complementation is: When information of a to-be-measured terminal is insufficient to implement a positioning function, a particular wireless communications technology such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is used. Specifically, both the to-be-measured terminal and a neighboring terminal need to have a particular wireless module, and the particular wireless module needs to be enabled. Supplementary information that the to-be-measured terminal lacks is obtained by means of interaction between the to-be-measured terminal and the neighboring terminal, and then positioning is performed by using the information of the to-be-measured terminal and the supplementary information obtained from the neighboring terminal. In the collaborative positioning that is based on distance measurement, similarly, a particular wireless communications technology is also used, and positioning is implemented by means of communication between the to-be-measured terminal and the neighboring terminal. A difference is that, information obtained by the to-be-measured terminal is location information of the neighboring terminal and distance measurement information between the to-be-measured terminal and the neighboring terminal.
However, in a prior-art collaborative positioning manner of a wireless terminal, collaboration information of a neighboring node is obtained by a to-be-measured terminal by using a particular wireless communications technology, and therefore the two collaboration parties are both required to support the particular wireless communications technology, that is, it is required that the two collaboration parties both need to have a particular wireless module, and the particular wireless module needs to be enabled.